Damned Wasps

 

September 18, 2016

Why do wasps ruin all the fun?  Not Muffy and Biff, but those dreaded hornets and yellow jackets that spend September slowly circling me like I'm a slice of juicy melon. They land on me, crawl up my arms, sneak under my shirt sleeves.   My teeth all but chatter as I try to stay still.  ( I may have wasps confused with bears.)  My husband likes to bat at them.  An act of provocation that will end with me stung  six ways from Sunday.
    I should pity the wasps.  They are essentially looking for their coffins.  Over the winter, all but the queen will die.  But I have no empathy as their mortuary is smack in the middle my favorite spot to sit in all the world  And wasps mean summer is over.
    My 50th high school reunion was last weekend.  I didn't go as I was two ferry rides and fifty years away. But the lead-up to the reunion brought lots of memories posted online.  I couldn't get over how many of my classmates were dead, especially the athletic ones.
   I ran into a girl from my freshman college dorm in the Edgartown Stop and Shop.  I wouldn't have recognized her without the Facebook connection.  Unbeknownst to me, she had once dated my husband.  Stranger and stranger, this whorl of memories.
  Later that week I met up with a girl from my Chappy days of horseback riding.  We had a long, lovely afternoon speaking of the past
   All these memories swarmed.
   But the wasps were louder.

Not my first rodeo....

I am no stranger to hurricanes.  I have ridden out many a storm in this very house, an 111-year old Victorian on a small island.  As a child, my fears were allayed by the fact that the diamond pane windows in the house were explicitly made to withstand gale force winds.  I was too naive to realize the large pieces of glass below the diamond panes were not protected.  Thus, when my brother, Vance, suggested I play dolls beneath the 8 foot square picture window during Hurricane Carol, I complied.
Currently, Hurricane Hermine which had headed out to sea decided to change course and thrash us.  We have just lost power.  Nothing makes me edgier than a loss of electricity.  Last night I couldn't sleep for all the noise: windows juddering against their weakened frames, doors trying to break loose.  The wind seems to be coming from all directions at the same time.

The power came back within three hours, which is a downright miracle.  Many was the hurricane that left us without electricity or water (electric pump) for a week.  We had to go to the fire station to retrieve buckets of water.
We are silly enough to think that the endless hours and dollars we spend to keep the house upright will be enough to see her through.  I hope to God it does.

Jitterbugging Down Memory Lane

I have two big brothers. This is the eldest, Vance.  I used to describe him as barbed wire wrapped around cotton candy.  Most would just describe him as cantankerous.  When I was little he sprinkled Tabasco sauce over random jelly beans in my Easter basket.  If he'd sauced them all, it would have been better.  I would have thrown them all away.  This way I was in constant suspense as I picked my way through candy landmine.  He shares a birthday with Hitler, which I've always thought explained a good deal.  He had a tender side but few people other than his wife saw it.

Vance was an Industrial Archaeologist in Pennsylvania.  The man can fix anything and solve just about any problem.  We would not have been able to keep the family house on the Vineyard if not for him.  He is also a wiz with woodwork, building dining room tables, cabinets, cradles, castles and doll houses.
He traveled the world and and sent me gorgeous photographs from which I paint.

But fate has been unkind to Vance.  Nine years ago his short term memory left him.  I don't know if it's from Lyme Disease or Alzheimers'.  He no longer barks commands, but asks for help.  Those of us he once 'supervised' are uneasy.

I spent a few days with him this week.  He still has a sense of humor which, like mine, is fairly mordant.   His long term memory is active.  The two of us spent 8 hours one day going back in time.  Over that span of hours, he repeated one story seventeen times.  His wife later told me the story wasn't true.  Vance now conflates the truth with imagination.

We are more alike than I thought.  I wrote two novels that reflected my family in a comedic vein.   Problem is, I no longer know what is true and what I made up.

Bereft

I am bereft.   No grandchildren to enjoy, no dogs to walk.

One dog, Rosie,  of the Quentin Tarrantino Christmas saga, has been banned from the house.  She is a sweet pit bull that was once a bait dog for fights.  It is small wonder that she has anxieties.  Her parents went to Seattle for nine days.  We were held hostage for the same duration.  If left alone she tried to chew her way out.

 

Last Christmas there was no blood shed, but when we went out to dinner, she tried to tunnel out the front door.  She gave the back door a half-hearted go.  She was more earnest this time.  She passed on the marrow bone in favor of the trim (which was liberally doused with the chewing deterrent, bitter apple)  My husband went to the grocery store and came back to a shredded door frame.  After that, one of us had to be where she could see us.  After six days, I thought she was settled in.  Lots of licks and kisses.  I ventured out.  My board meeting ran long.  She re-attacked the above spot and then started a new hole two feet away.

My other granddog, Sam, used to be a lunatic but age has calmed him.  He still talks or rather grumbles with dispiriting regularity.  But a good dog.

Which brings me to the hardest bit.  My son, his wife and two children (seven weeks and 17 months) and Sam, left for TWO years in Korea today.  

This will be a bold, new adventure. 

Eventually, I will be happy for them.  But not just yet.

Alpha and Omega

You get all sorts if you open your house to strangers.  Not everyone is a happy camper.   Every season has its highs and lows.  But this year we had, in rapid succession, the alpha and omega of tenants.

My mother loathed being a summer rental landlady.  My thirty year tenure cemented my antipathy. When I first took over managing the house in 1985, my Sunday mornings were a nightmare of cranky tenant calls.  (We advertise house as being eclectic.  Maybe some folks took that to mean we had electricity.)

 Some complaints were legitimate but most were not.  I love this house.  The complaints felt like scurrilous attacks on my child.  The house is 111 years old.  Something is always going south.  Try as we might to anticipate every problem, it is not possible.

My husband, the new landlord, was determined to get a five star rating with our very first Home Away rental.  He really went the extra mile with new sofas, new games for teenagers, new life jackets, new cooktop and a very nice bottle of wine.

We waited anxiously for their response.  Bless them, they loved the house.  It reminded them of their childhood summer home in Rhode Island.  They remade all the beds with clean sheets (which the cleaner assumed were dirty and removed).  Two of the guests wrote lovely notes.  My husband was flying high.  A grateful shout out to the Maron/Ryland family reunion.

The next tenants had rented from us before, so we weren't worried.  Upon leaving, the tenant wrote an email saying they had had a great time.  They reported they had taken the garbage out. (This seemed odd to me as what else would you do with garbage?  We have a special shed for the garbage cans.)

As an afterthought, she noted the upstairs toilet appeared to be backed up.

Decorum prevents me from showing the toilet as my brother found it the next day.  It was beyond putrid.  The plumber required a special tool.  The garbage which they "took out", was scattered on the lawn.  Not even near the appropriate garbage shed.  Many woodland creatures treated it as a pop-up Old Country Buffet.


But that was just the beginning.  My brother found bed pads reeking of urine with sandy beach towels lumped underneath, ripped chairs and broken shades.

 If a tenant had arrived instead of my brother, we would have had to put them up in a hotel (as we did two years ago when a bat was spotted).   This family had rented from us before.  Now I wonder if they were the crew whose teenagers stuffed empty airline-size bottles of liquor in the toilet, necessitating another plumber bill.

My home had suffered a frat party. The Omega House.

Waiting for the Honey Wagon

   Stress has been wailing at my door.  Uncertainty about the future of the art center at the Torpedo Factory, has caused me to resume meditation.
   Life circles back on itself.  Four years ago  my acupuncturist encouraged me to resume the meditation practice that I had abandoned in my 30's.  I had problems getting into it again.  She said to imagine a place where I felt completely myself.  I thought of the view from the summer house porch.
   (From a post from 2012 )
   "I recall of the angle of the sunlight, the smell of the sea and the bayberry, the drone of the mosquitoes.  Happy place!
 But it's a short jump from that porch to unhappy thoughts.  My mind is on the porch, feeling the breeze, and the next instant I'm thinking about the septic tank.  We have been stewards of the house for 27 years and I don't think we've ever had it pumped.  I remember vaguely that my parents had it done.  I believe it is under the yard in back.  No telling where the opening is.  Probably six feet into the brambles. My mother told me as a child not to play in a certain corner of the yard, but was that the septic tank or the underground root cellar?"

    I stopped meditating several months after I wrote that post.

   We owners  (three kin and their spouses) rent the house most of the summer to help defray the taxes, insurance and unending maintenance of a 111-year old house. For years we have talked about getting the septic drained.  But neither brother knew where it was.  My guess was instantly dismissed as it was uphill from the house.  No idiot would ever put a septic tank uphill.

    The search became imperative last year when tenants complained of a sewage smell. The tenants insisted we drain the septic  tank if they were to lease again...

    Fast forward to early May when the plumber came to turn on the water.  He discovered that the waste pipe in the crawl space under the house had ruptured.  For a tidy sum, the cast iron line was repaired.  My husband, now the one in charge of bills, maintenance and general  hysteria, called several septic companies on the island.  We live on an island off of an island.  The little ferry that shuttles between islands cannot accommodate most honey wagons.  Finally, he found one that did.  Their metal detector stopped beeping 15 feet from the house.  They began digging only to discover the cast iron pipe was joined to a PVC pipe that ran uphill (to the very spot I had identified). The tank was only half full, leaving one to wonder where the rest of 30 years of flushes had gone.  The bad news was that the PVC pipe was blocked.

    This is what I love about renting out the family house.  Tenants.  The first blockage was formed by baby wipes.  The second from bricks.  The third from liquor bottles.  I do remember some years ago paying the plumber $300 to unblock a toilet.  The culprit? Dozens of empty airline bottles of liquor.  Apparently, the family's teenagers had flushed the evidence.

    So, I understand the baby wipes and even the liquor bottles, but why the bricks?

The Whole FamDamily

                                            Vineyard, 2004

Well, here's a strange admission for Mother's Day.    This is the only photo I could find of me with both of my children.   I remember being with them for years. ( I couldn't have made that up, could I?)   But I lack the photographic evidence.  Where's "Big Brother" and video surveillance when you need it?